f
135
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Miriam Hansen
Early Cinema, Late Cinema:
Transformations of the
Public Sphere
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There tends to be a moment, in the development of cultural practices,
when discolUSes of the recent past become history; they are no longer
merely outdated but, like bell-bottom jeans, miniskirts, and platform
shoes, acquire historicity. This is what seems to have happened with film
theory of the 1970s and early 1980s, in particular as it revolved around
the notion of the spectator. I am thinking here of psychoanalytic-semi­
otic approaches, often inflected with Marxist and feminist politics,
associated with thenames ofJean-Lauis Baudry, the later Christian Metz,
Raymond BellollI, Stephen Heath, and Laura Mulvey, to mention oulya
few. As has been pointed out widely, the paradigmatic distinction of
1970s film theory-its break with earlier film theory-consiatedin a shift
of focus from textual structures or ontologies of the medium to processes
of reception and spectatorship. Whether concerned with the cinematic
apparatus or with textual operatiollfl of enunciation and address, these
approaches converged in the question of how the cinema works to
COllfltruct, interpellate, and reproduce its viewer as subject and how it
solicits actual moviegoers to identify with and through ideologically
marked positions of subjectivity. In. either case, the inquiry hinged on the
hypothetical term of an ideal spectator, a unified and unifying position
offered by the text or apparatus even though, as £enl.inist and, more
recently, subaltern critics have pointed out, this position for some
l
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TIlls is ;1 slightly cXpallded version of an essa.y that origin.a.lly appeared in Screen 34:3
{Aut'..lmn 1993" 197-210. Reprinted by permission of the author and Screen.
134 t
TransjonnatiOP..5 qf the Public Sphere
viewers tums out to be a "locus of impossibility,"l of self-denial or
masochism.
I will. not reiterate the by now ritnal critique of that t"ype of film
theory, whether concerning its epistemological and methodological short­
cuts, its monolithic notion of classical cinema, or its abstract, passive
conception of the spectator and processes of reception; these were im­
portant issues when the theoty waS still current. What I find more
interesting is that the very category of the spectator developed by psy­
choanalytic-semiotic film theoty seems to have become obsolete-not
only because new scholarship has displaced it with historically and
culturally more specific models but because the mode of reception this
spectator was supposed to epitomize is itself becoming a matter of the
past. The historical significance of 1970s theories of spectatorship may
well be that they emerged at thc threshold of a paradigmatic transforma­
tion of the ways films are disseminated and consumed. In. other words,
even as those theones set out to unmask the ideological effects of the
classical Hollywood cinema, they might effectively, and perhaps un­
wittingly, have mummified the spectator-subject of classical cinema.
We are only now beginning to understand the massive changes
that have assailed the instituti911 of cinema over the past two decades.
Those changes are the result of a combination of technological and
economic developments that have displaced the cinema as the only and
primary site of film consumption. New electronic technologies propped
onto television, in particular video playback, satellite, and cable systems,
have shifted the venues for film viewing in the direction of domestic
space and have profoundly changed the terms on which viewers can
interact with films. The spatioperceptnal cordiguration of television
within the domestic environment has broken the spell of the classical
diegesis; the compulsive temporality of public projection has given way
to, ostensibly more self-regulated yet privatized, distracted, and frag­
mented acts of consumption. As critics have observed, an aesthetics of
the glance is replacing the aesthetics of the gaze-the illUSiOnist absoIp­
tion of the viewer that is considered one of the hallmarka of classical
cinema.2.
.
These changes have in tum affected the cinema in the old sense:
as the public, cornmerciafprojection of films on theatrical premises. For
one thing, there have never-not since the days of the nickelodeon~been
lIS many complaints about people talking during the shows as in the
American press of recent months, with pundits charging that the vulgar­
iaIl!l simply can't tell the difference between watch:ing a movie in the
136
137
M'irtam Hansen
Tra"1!Drmations oj tile Public Sphere
theater and watching a video in their living room. What such complaints
signal is that the classical principle by which reception is controlled by
the film as an integral product and commodity is weakened by the social
proliferation of film consumption in institutionally less regulated view·
ing Situations. For another, the increased dependence of film production
on the video market has exacerbated the crim of the audience that
Hollywood has confronted in various fonns at least since the populariza·
tion of television in the 1950s. Blockbuster films, for instance, are
catering to as many diverse constituencies as possible, confronting the
problem of, as Timothy Corrigan puts it, "an audience fragmented
beyond any controllable identity.',s Such films-from Gremlins through
the Terminator films to Blam Stoker's Dracula-no longer attempt to
homogenize empirically diverse viewers by way of unifying strategies of
spectator pOSitioning (as 1970s film theorists .claimed with regard to
classical films). Rather, the blockbuster gamble cons.ists of offeting
something to everyone, of appealing to diverse interests with a diversity
of attractions and multiple levels of textuality. All this is not to say that
the classical mode of spectatorship has vanished without a trace; on the
contrary, it makes powerful returns in the nostalgia mode. But it has
become one of a number of options, often contextualized and ironized,
. and it no longer functions as the totalitarian norm it is supposed to have
been during the 1930s and 1940s4
On a geopolitical level, the shift in film·spectator relations
corresponds to the emergence of new, transnational corporate networks
that circulate movies and videos along with music, foods, fashions,
advertising, infoImation, and communication technologies. While sys­
tems of distribution and exchange are interconnected and unified on a
global scale, the process is characterized by a burgeoning diversification
of products and, at the same time, increased privatization of the. modes
and venues of consumption.5 New fonns and genres of iliasporic and
indigenized mass culture have emerged, at once syncretistic and original,
and imported products are tr>uIsfonned and appropristed through highly
specific forms of reception 6 Thus, parallel with the demise of classical
cinema, we have been wituessing the end of so-called modern maSs
culture-the kind of mass culture that prevailed, roughly, from the 1920s
through the 1960s aod is commonly associated with a Fordist economy,
with standardized production and social homogenization, and with crit­
ical keywords like secondary exploitation, Americanization, and cultural
imperialism. Today's posmodem, globalized culture of consumption has
developed new, and ever more elusive, technologies of pov.'eI and com­
I
f
ti
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modification, to be sure, operating through diversification rather than
homogenization: the worldwide manufacture of diversity does anyt~
but automatically translate into a "new culture politics of difference."
But it has also multiplied the junctures at which such a politics could­
and, in many places has--come into existence, in particular with alter·
Illltive practices in film and video. s At any rate, whatever political score
one may assign to these developments, it is obvious that they require
different theories of reception and identification from those predicated
on classical Hollywood cinema and theilmeriC<ln model of mass L-ulture.
As classical fonns of film consumption seem to be unraveling on
a worldwide scale, the situation has a certain deja'va effect. In more chan
one way, contemporary fonns of media culture evoke the parallel of early
cinema. As recent scholarship has stressed, the paradigmatic distinction
of early cinema from classical cinema involved not only different COn·
ceptions of space, time, narrative, and genre but, above all, a different
conception of the relations between film and viewer. That difference has
been traced both at the stylistic level-in textual modes of representation
and address-and at the level of exhibition practices-the perfonnance
of films in commercial settings.
Aiming at the specificity of early film.viewer relations, Tom
Gunning has coined the by now familiar phrase cinema of attractions,
which plays on the Eisensteinian sense of attraction as well as its more
colloquial usage in the context offairgrounds, circuses, variety shows,
dime museums, and other commercial entertainment venues that had
also inspired Eisenstein's use of the tenn 9 Early cinema inherited
from those venues a diversity of genres and topics such as boxing
matches, scenes from the wild west and passion plays, travelogues in
the manner of the stereopticon lectures, trick fihns in the tradition of
magic shows, sight gags and comic skits from the burlesque or vaudc­
ville stage, pornographic flicks in the peep-show vein, and highlights
from popular plays and operas. With this tr:!.,.d:!!;.ipn" ~rlX fjlms adi?pted
a p':rti~ul~..~~~~~..ss.~f~~.Pl:-y'",of !,lE~!!man.lh.i£cEs~jJ!X.the goal
otassaultingviewers with sensational, supernatural, scientific, senti­
mental;-ol"tJ'tIie-rWis1fsfiriiiifa'tiii.g 's!iihts;'as"oppo-;e-;r toenvefOPilig
theIii1'hT6'til'eilfusiOlJ:'of ",iictiomrrmmrtlve:-TTi1,
iiresei:ltanonal ra:ther thanrepfesdi'iifional; that is, they tended
to address the viewer directly-as in frequent asides to the camera and
the predominantly frontal organization of space-rather than indi­
rectly-as classical films do through perceptual absorption into a
closed diegetic space. 10
was
stY1e'OFe-armrrms
r',
138
Mlriam Hansen
139
Transformations of the Public Sphere
True to their variety lineage, early films lured patrons with a
diversity, if not an excess of appeals, as opposed to the later subordination
and integration of polymorphous spectatorial pleasures under the regime
of classical narrative. Such appeals included physical jolts, shocks, and
sensatioDS-whether of a kinetic, pornographic, or abjective sort-from
the many films shot from moving vehicles (e.g., Interior N. Y. Subway,
14th Street to 42nd Street) to actualities orreenactments of disasters and
executions le.g., Tbe Electrocution of an Elepbant). Even though such
physiological responses were Soon denigrated or marginaUzedin favor of
the classical ideal of disembodied, specularized spectatorship, thcy have
resurfaced in various guises, from such interludes as Cinerama and 3-D
to the latest versions linfluenced by MTV) of cult, horror, and action
films. 11
Moreover, early films relied more overtly on cultural intertexts,
such as the popular stories, songs, or political cartoons on which many
of them were based, wherher illustrating or spoofing them. Indeed, as
Charles Musser has shown, the major distinction between early narrative
films and protoclassical oneS was the extent to which narrative compre­
hension of the former depended on the audience's familiarity with the
stoty or event depicted12 Porter's film Waiting at the ChUlCh (1906), for
instance, makes little sense if we don't know the popular hit by the same
title sung by Vesta VictOria, and The "Teddy' Bears (1907) requires
foreknowledge not only of the Goldilocks story but also of political satire
surrounding Theodore Roosevelt's hunting exploits. Such overt farms of
intertextuality placed a much greater emphasis on the enactment of the
film by the audience and on the audience's interaction with the film, but
it also meant that reception was at the mercy of factors that could bc
neither controlled nor standardized by means of strategies of production.
Key to the shift toward classical cinema was, consequently, the more
systematic effort, from about 1907 on, to develop a mode of narration
that made films self·explanatory and self-contained and that allowed
films to be understood by a mass audience regardless of individual
.cultural and ei:hruc background and of site and mode of exhibition.
It is a mark of early cinema's specificity that its effects on thc
viewer were determined less
the film as complete product and inter/
nationally circulated commodity than by the particular context of exhi­
bition-the particular show. The format of presentation typical of early
cinema was shaped by the commercial entertainments in whose context
films were first shown, in particular vaudeville and traveling shows.
From those entertainment forms, the cinema borrowed two major prin.
ciples: III a disjunctive style of programming-the variety fonnat-hy
which short films alternated with live performances {vaudeville turns,
animal, acrobat, and magic acts, song slides) and !21 the mediation of the
individual film by personnel present in the theater, such as lecturers,
sound effects specialists, and, invariably, musicians. Both principles
preserved a perceptual continuum between the space/time of the theater
and the illusionist world on screen, as opposed to the classical segregation
ohicreen and theater space with its regime of absence and presence and
its discipline of silence, spellbound passivity, and perceptual isolation.
What is more, early cinema's dispersal of meaning across £ilmjc and
nonfilmic sources, such as the alternation of films and numbers, lent the
exhibition the character of a live event, that is, a performance that varied
from place to place and time to time depending on theater type and
location, audience composition, and musical accompaniment. Some of
these practices, such as the variety format and the priority of the theater
experience over the film expe:rience-persisted well into the nickelodeon
period and throughout the silent period, even as the films themselves
were increasingly patterned on classical principles. 13
. Yet this attempt to delineate early cinema's paradigmatic differ­
encebypinpOinting consistent traits and traditions may be essentislizing
and misleading. The diversity that characterizes early cinema's offerings
and appeals was far from institutionalized: it was more likely an effect
of experimental instability. As Gunning suggests, "It is perhaps early
cinema's very mutability and fragmented nature linto many practices
with unstable hierarchies of importance) that contrasts most sharply
with wMt has become the model of classical Hollywood cinema.,,14
However stable and functional classical cinema may have appeared by
contrast land that stability is as much the prodoct of a particular histo;
riographic optics as of the dominant industrial mode), contemporazyfilm
and media culture seems to be reverting to a state in which transitory,
ephemeral practices are mushroom.i.ng, the institntion of cinema is
increasingly fragmented and dispersed, and long-standing hierarchies of
production, distribution, and exhibition have lost their force.
The comparison between preclassical and contemporary modes
of film constunption has occasionally been floated in recent yearS,
charged with more or less polemical valences. In an essay published in
1982, Noel Burch observes that "United States network television COn­
stitutes a retum to the days of the nickelodeon" and argues, with
considerable alarm, that the disengaged, disjonctive format of U.S. tele­
vision might represent "a veritable turning back of die clock," a regres­
I
140
/;nriam
Hansen
sion that is nothing less than "innocent!' That observation leads him to
defend, as essential to a politiecally progressive form of media practice,
the otherwise much maligned "strong diegctic effect" of classical cin­
ema, the "Institutional Mode of Representation."lS A decade later,
parallels between pre classical and postelassical forms of spectatorship,
between early modern and postmodern forms of distraction and diversity,
are eVen more pronounced, though no less in need of discussion. What is
the point of such a comparison? How can we make it productive heyond
formalist analogy, heyond nostalgia or cultural pessimism? How can we
align those two moments without obliteratingthelr historical difference?
I suggest that drawing a traj ectory from postclassical to preclassi­
cal cinema makes sense not only because of formal s:i:r:uilarities in the
relations of representation and reception. More important, these fermal
similarities warrant closer scrutiny because both moments mark a major
transition in the development of the public sphere. I am using the term
public here in the most general sense, denoting a discursive matrix or
process through which social experience is articulated, interpreted, ne­
gotiated, and contested in an intersubjective, potentiallycoUective, and
oppositional funn. My understanding of the tenn is indebted to debates
in the tradition of the Frankfurt School, associated with the work of
Jiirgen Habermas, Oskar Negt, and Aleunde.r Kluge. Indeed, I would
argue that the question of the public is probably the Frankfurt Scboot's
most frultfullegacy for fihn and mass culture theory today.
I see the debates on the public in the tradition of the Frankfurt
School as the continuation of a critical project that registered, early on,
the key role of cinema and mass culture in the profound restructuration
of SUbjectivity. At the same time it saw the modem media's liberatory,
democratic potential evaporate in media'S alienating, confOrmist, and
manipulative use in Fordist-liberal capitalism, to say nothing of fascism.
Kluge may well have shared Adorno's analysis of the culture industry
land its administrative, postwar West German counterpart). But he drew
different 'aesthetic and political conclusions from that analysis: he be­
came a fihIlmaker and activist promoting an alternative film and media
culture. Drawing on Adorno's own philosophy, in particular Negative
Dialectics and the concept of nOnidentity, Kluge set out to mobilize the
aporias of the culture industry theSis-by SWitching the frame from the
logics of commodity and identity to the dynamics of the public sphe.re. 16
In English-language contexts, the category of the public has
become increasingly important to a wide variety of fields and debates:
philosophy; anthropology; history; South Asian, East Asian, and African
141
TrantformaliDns qf the Public Sphere
studies; postcolOnial and subaltern studies; the postrnodem art scene,
and feminist, gayjlesbian, and queer polities. If public sphere theory has
so far had little impact on cinema and media studies, it has been fur a
good or, rather, not SO good reason. Many of these debates take as their
• point of departure the framework developed by Habermas in his 1962
study The Structural TransfoImation of the Public Spbere, whicb only
recently appeared in English translation. 17 The advantage of Habermas's
approach, that he historicizes the concept of the public sphere by tracing
its emergence in the eighteenth century, turns into a disadvantage when
it comes to the mass-mediated publics of later centeries. Positing the
Enlightenment idea of the public sphere as a critical nOrm (even as
historically it has degenerated into all ideology), Habennas can view
subsequent fonnations of public life only in terms of disintegration and
decline. With the shift from cultural riisorme:n:lI!J1t to cultural consump­
tion, says Haberma., the dialectics of public and private unravels into
individuated acts of reception, even in the context of mass events. The
problem with·.this approach is not only that it remains squarely within
the paradigm of the culture industry but that the underlying notion of
the public is predicated on face-to-face communication, hence insuffi­
cient for conceptualizing mass-mediated forms of public life. 18
It is in view of this paradox-the problem of howto conceptualize
the dimension of the public in a technologically and industrially medi­
ated public sphere that has eroded the very conditions of discursive
inte.raction, participation, and self-representation-that Negt's and Kluge's
study The Public Sphere and Experience 11972) offers a usefu1interven­
tion. 19 Like a number, of Habermas's recent American critics, Negt and
Kluge argue that the ideal of the eighteenth-century public sphere was
ideological in its very conception, masking the de facto exclusion of
substantial social groups (workers, women, servants) and of vital social
issues such as the matctial conditions of production and reproduction
(sexuality, child rearing). Negt and Kluge insist on the nero to understand
postliberal and postliterary fonnalions of the public sphere-crucially
defined'by the photographic and electronic media-in terms other than
thos~ of diRintegration and decline.
Negt's and Kluge's argument rests on two major moves; One is
to call into question the very concept of the public as it is traditionally
understood. The authors SUIVey the various institutions and activities
that claim the t=public Ipublic opinion, public force, public relations),
and they then contrast these rather limited and ossified, professionalized
practices with another sense of the tenn, that of a u general hOIizon
142 143
Miriam Hansen Transformations of Ill, Public Sphere
B"'perience in which what is really or supposedly relevant for all members
of society is summarized. ,,20 This expansion of the category of the public
involves a shift from the formal conditions of communication {free
association, free speech, equalparticipation, polite argoment} to the more
comprehensive notion of a "social horizon of experience," grounded in
what Negt and Kluge call "the context of living" ILebenszusammen­
hang}, in material, psychic and social re/production. Zl This horizon
includes, emphatically, what the dominant public sphere either leaves
out, privatizes, or acknowledges only in an abstract and fragmented form.
Predicated on inclusion and interconnection (Zusammenhang), the ho­
rizon involves the diMectical imbrication of three distinct layers: ill the
experience of re/production under capitalist, alienated conditions; (2) the
systematic blockage of that experience as a horizon in its own right, that
is, the separation of the experiencing subjects from the networks ofpublic
expression and representation; and 13} as a response to that blockage­
imaginative and resistant modes of realigning the sundered chunks of
experience and of reality and fantasy, time, and history and memoryP
Negt's and Kluge's second move is that they do not construct
this horizon in analogy to the bourgeois-liberal model-as a presumably
autonomous sphere above the marketplace and particular interests-but
rather trace its contours in the new industrial-commercial publics that
no longer pretend to such a separate, independent status. These "public
spheres of production" include a variety of contexts, such as factory
communities, spaces of commerce and consumption (restaurants, shop­
ping malls), and, of course, the cinema and other privately owned media
of the"consciousness industry_,,23 Lacking legitimation of their own, the
industrial-commercial publics enter into alliances with the disintegrat­
ing, bourgeois public sphere, from opera and masterpiece theater to
political parties and institutions of parliamentary democracy; the latter
in turn increasingly depends on industrial-commercial publicity for its
continued operation and power. (The idea oEan "electronic townhall,"
whose populist vencer is part and parcel of its syncretistic and contradic­
tory public ch-aracter, marks a further step in that direction.) But even as
the public spheres of production reproduce the ideolOgical, exclUSionary
mechanisms of the bourgeois prototype, they also aim, for economic
reasons, at a maxim~m ofinclusion. Lackingsubstance of their own, they
voraciously absorb, as their fodder, or raw material, contexts of living
that are hitherto bracketed from representation-if only to appropriate,
aSsimilate, abstract, and commodify vital areas of social experience and
if only to render them obsolete onCe c;thausted and thus again insignili­
cant. It is in their potentially indiscriminating, inclusive grasp, Negt and
Kluge argue, that the public spheres of production make visible, at certain
junctures, a different function of the public, namely that of a social
horizon of experience.
In The Public Sphere and Experience, Negt and Kluge refer to
this emphatically inclusive horizon by the self-consciously anachronis­
tic ternl proletarian public sphere, which they see prefigured in altema­
tive and oppositional publics or counterpublics. True to the M.a:rxian
sense of the tenn, the proletlJIian public sphere is not an empirical
category (and certainly has little to do with traditional labor organiza­
tions) but a category of negation in both a critical and a utopian sense,
referring to the' fragmentation of human labor, existence and experience,
and its dialectical opposite: the practical negation of existing conditions
in their totality. In their subsequent collaboration, History and Obsti­
nacy (1981), Negt and Kluge locate that utopian possibility in the very
process of (alienatedl production, in the "historical organization of labor
power.,,24 For, while constituted in the process of separatlon (e.g., prim­
itive accumulation and division of laborl, labor power contains and
reproduces capacities and energies that exceed its realization in/as a
commodity: resistance to separation, Eigensinn (stubbornness, self-will),
self-regniation, fantasy, memory, curiosity, cooperation, feelings, and
. skills in excess of capitalist valorization. Whether and how those energies
can become effective depends on the organization of the public sphere.
Methodologically, this translates into a principled oscillation be­
tween an empirical spproach--£ruJ.lyzing the organization of public lifC in a
given situation-and an emphatic sense of poblicness that traces the dy­
namics of that situation in tenns of its forgotten or unrealized possibilities.
The critical measure in each case will be the extent to which experience is
dia/organized from above-by the exclusionary standards of high culture or
in the interest of profit-<>r from below-by the experiencing subjects
themselves, on the basis of their context of living. The political task is to
create "reLationality" (Jameson's transla:t:ion of Zusammenhangl; to make
connections between isolated chunks of experience across segregated do­
mains of work and leisure, fiction and fact, and past and present; and to
identify points of contiguity among diverse and/orcornpetingpartial publics
and counterpublics. This politics ofre1ationality is up against the hegemonic
form of zusammenhang-the violent pseudosynthesis of the dominant
public sphere, which is maintained bythe alliance of industrial-commercial
and bourgeOis publicity and which masquerades as the public sphere (the
subject of the evening news, the "nation"l.
144
145 Miriam Hansen
r TansJonnan"", oJ /he Publ", Sphere But this is not an either/or argument. Negt and Kluge insist that
it is impossible to define or describe Offeritlichkeit, or publicness, in the
singular, as if it had any homogeneous substance. Rather, it can be
understood always and only as an aggregation or mixture of different
types of public life, corresponding to lmeven stages of economic, techni­
cal, and social organization ranging from local to global parameters. If
Negt and Kluge, for heuristic puxposes, distinguish among bourgeois,
industrial-commercial, and proletarian prototypes, theyarguc that none
of these Can be grasped in purity or isolation from each other but onlym
their mutual imbrication and in specific overlaps, parasitic cohabita­
tions, and structural contradictions.
Conceptualizing the public as a mixture of competing forms of
organ:izing social experience means thinking of it as a potentially volatile
process, defined by different speeds and temporal markers. Such syncre­
tistic dynamics harbors a potential for instability, for accidental colli­
sions and opportunities, and for unpredictable conjunctures and aleatory
developments. It is in the seams and fissures between uneven fonnations
of public life that alternative aligrunents and alliances can emerge.25 And
it is in the degree to which a public sphere affords these windows of
improvisation and reconfiguration that, I think, Gunning's observation
about early cinema's relative instability has its' larger reference point.
And this particular dynamic of the public is also what realigns early
cinema, not with its classical successor but with the current phase of
film and media culture.
What is the point of thinking about cinema in terms of the
public? K1ugehimseJ.f, in his writings, films, and video practice, has been
putting the politics of the public sphere into practice on several levels.
Central to his film aesthetics is a concept of montage predicated on
relationality-he refers tomantage as the morphology of relations (Form­
enwelt des ZusammenbangsfU'-a textual climbing wall designed to
encourage viewers to draw their own connections across generic divi~
sions of fiction and documentary and of disparate realms and registers of
experience. A film is successful in that regard if it manages to activate
(rather than merely usuxp) what Kluge calls "the film in the spectator's
head"-the horizon of experience as instantiated in the subject. The
specific connections encouraged by the film respond to the structural
blockages of experience perpetuated by the dominant public sphere, in
particular, in the case of (West) Germany, the divisions imposed by the
ossified programming structures of state-sponsored television2i But
since the monopoly of the latter has been breaking up over the past
decade, with a proliferation of private channels (elDse to forty) approxi­
mating the diversification level of television in the United States, Kluge
has reoriented his project in view of the complex and dramatic changes
in the German-and European-media landscape. Producing a. weekly
program for commercial television, he has bcen trying to reinvent alter­
native forms of cinema-a contemporary cinema of attractions-in the
politically compromising, potentially neutralizing envitonment of ad­
vanced electronic pUblicity.28
BeyondKlnge'sown,stilltosomeextentmodemist,fllmaesthetics,
the concept of the public can bc mobilized to address a number of key
concerns of film and· media studies in recent years and to take them a step
further. In particular, thinking of the cinema in terms of the public involves
an awroaCh that cuts across theoretical and historical as well as textual and
contextual modes of inquiry, for the cinema functions both as a public
sphere of its own-defined by specific relations of represcotation and
reception-lUld as part of a larger social horizon-defined. by other media
and by the overlspping local, national and global, face-to-face and de·
territorialized structures of public life. This dual focus allows us to salvage
some of the insights of formalist and psychoanalytic film theory-insights
into the workings of cinematic texts and the psychic mechanisms of
reception-while changing their paradigmatic status_ For even if we situate
reception within a specific historical and social framework, and even as the
category of the spectator has become problematic, we still need" theoretical
understanding of the possiblc.relations betweenfihns and viewers, between
representation and subjectivity. The questions raised in the name of alter­
native appropriations of late-capitalist mass culture cannot be answered by
empirical reception studies. These questions need to be discussed in terms
of experience lin the emphatic Frankfurt SChool sense, which includes
memory and the unconscious) and the conditions of its possibility-the
structures that Simultaneously restrict and enable agenCY, interpretation,
and self-organization. ­
The tum to (or, to some extent, revival ofl more empirically oriented
reception studies--and With it the methodolOglcal conflation of the actual
social viewer and the spectator-subjeet---h;as been flanked, especially in
Europe, by a nostalgic revival of the cinema as a good object. In a recently
published anthology of cinephile reminiscences, Seeing in the Dark, the
editors complain that methods of empirical audience research fail to
fully capture the individual, subjective esperience of fijmgoing, since
they miss out idiosyncratic decnl and tbe personal dreamworld. Mea­
r
146
147
Miriam Hansen
Transjormatlons of the Public Sphere
suring applaus~ does not reveal that the movie was memorable for the
woman in the third row because the building on screen reminded he! of .
where she went to school and all those childhood memories came
flooding baCk intercut with the film while the auditoIium gently shook
as an undexground train passed beneath and a cigarette ;ash fluttered
down from the halcony in the projector beam.29
To be' sure, empirical. audience research misses all these marvelous, and
essential, dimensions of moviegoing las would, for that matter, a Laca:nian­
Althusserian analysis of spectatorial positioning). But to reduce these
dimensions, in a subjectivist vein, to the merely personal and idiosyn­
cratic will mean missing out on the more systematic parameters of
subjectivity that structure, enable, and refract our personal engagement
with the film. These include, for instance, the particular cinematic style
that set off the viewer's memory; the contrast between the nostalgically
evoked local theater setting (e.g., cigarette smoke, high-modern mban
technology) and the context of electronic and global postmodernity (e,g.,
the likelihood that the viewer in the third row, like the one behind her,
may usually watch soap operasl; and the fact that the viewer belongs to
the social group of women-differentiated according to class, race, eth­
nicity, sexual orientation, and generation-which renders herrclation to
the film shown, probably one version or another of classical cinema,
problematic in particular ways. These and other factors strueture the
horizon of experience that we carry aronnd with us, whether we watch
a film alone or collectively. At the same time, that horizon enables and
allows us to reflect upon individual experience; indeed, the ability of a
film and a viewing situation to trigger persoual and collective memory
is a measure of its quality as a public sphere.
Thinking of the cinema in tennsof the public means reconstruct­
ing a horizon of reception not oniyin terms of sociological determinants,
whether pertaining to statistically definable demographic groups or
.traditional communities; but also in terms of multiple and conflicting
identities and constituencies. Indeed, the cinema can, at certain junc­
tures,function as a matrix for challenging social positions of identity and
otherness and as a catalyst for new forms of community and solidatity.
That this may happen on the terrain of late-capitalist consumption,
however, does not mean that we should resign ourselves to the range of
existing products andmodes of production, On the contrary, the category
of the public retains a critical, utopian edge, predicated on the ideal of
collective self-determination, (This perspective mandates not only main­
taining critiGaI distinctions with regard to the commercially dissemin­
ated fare but also envisioning alternative media products and the alter­
native organization of the relations of representation and reception. In
that sense, the concept of the public forestalls the idealization of con­
sumption that has become habitual in some qwrters of cultural studies./
To condude, I retum to the significance of early cinema, in
partiCular for assessing contemporary developments. I have argued else­
where that early cinema, and the peISistence of early exhibition practices
through and even beyond the nickelodeon period, provided the condi­
tions for an alternative public sphere BO Specifically, it did so as an
industrial-commercial public sphere that during a crucial phase de­
pended on peripheral social groups limmigrants, members of the recently
urban:h:ed working class, women/ and thus, willingly or not, catered to
people with specific needs, anxieties, and fantasies-people whose expe­
rience Was shaped by more or less traumatic forms of territorial and
cultmal displacement. The problems posed by the cinema's availability
to ethnically diverse, SOCially unruly, and sexually mixed audiences iu
tum prompted the elaboration of ciassical modes of narration and spec­
tator positioning. Rather than taldngthe industrial promotion of classical
cinema (and with it the gentrification of theaters and the streamlining of
exhibition practices) as the prime determining factor, however, I see
silent cinema as the site of overlapping, uneven, and competiog types of
publicity. These include the more local spheres of late-nineteenth-cen­
tury popular amusements, new commercial entertainments such as
vaudeville and amusement parks, and the emerging sphere of maSS­
cultirraJ production and distribution. As a composite pnblic sphere, the
nickelodeon combined traditions of live peIformance with an industri­
ally produced commodity circulated on both national and international
scales; that is, technolOgically mediated forms of publicity coexisted
with forms of public life predicated on face-ta-face relations,
Above all, the conception of film exhibition as a live performance
incompleteness of the film as circulated commodity) created a
margin of improvisation, interpretation, and unpredictability that made
it a pnblic event in the emphatic sense and a collective horizon in which
industrially processed experience could be reappropriated by the experi­
encing subjects. This means that films were viewed differently and were
likelY to have a wide range of meanings depending on the nelghbothood
and status of the theater, on the ethnic and racial background of the
habitual audience, on the mixture of gender and generation, and on the
ambition and skilis of the exhibitor and the performing personneL In
148
149
Miriam Hansen
TTal15formatiol'l$ of the Public Sphere
Crucago movie theaters catering to African-Americans during the 1910s
and 1920s, for instance, the nonfilmic program drew heavily on Southern
black perfonnance traditions, and live musical accompaniment was
more likely inspired by jazz and blues thm by Wagner and Waldteuiel.31
Although the films shown in such theaters were largely white main­
stream productions, their meMling was bound to be fractured and iron­
ized in the context of black performance and audience response.l am not
saying that such reappropriation actually happened in every single
. screening or every theater, nor do I think that empirical methods of
research could determine whether it did or not. But the syncretistic
makeup of cinematic publicity furnished the structural conditions under
which that matgin could be actualized, under which altern.ativeforms of
reception and meaning could gain a momentum of their own.
This dynamic was not limited to the local level, but could,
because of its mass-cultural distribution, spread across traditional cul·
tural and tetritorial boundaries. A case in point is the star system, in
particular the rise of stars whose marketable persona conflicted with
Hollywood's traditional racial and sexual orientations. As studies on
individual stars such as Greta Garbo, Rudolph Valentino, Paul Robeson,
and Mae West suggest, there is never.a seamless among between studio
publici ty, fan magazines, and actual audiences, and the push and pull
among these forces have again and again given rise to subcultural
form.ations of reception.32
Today, the lines of the frontiers of transgression are drawn
differently, and transgressiveness itself has become infinitely more
part of the game than it was during the 1920.. Valentino has been
vindicated by a long line of androgyuous performers, from Elvis througb
Mick Jagger to Prince and Michael Jackson, and Madonna mal<es us
nostalgic for the aesthetic implantation of perversions afforded by the
Production Code. But racism and homophobia persist, and the gains
made by the women's movement are inseparable from masculinist
backlash, the antiabortion campaign, and heterosexual violence. Now
as then, these issues are negotiated through the most advanced forms
of industrial-commercial publicity-then a cinema and fan culture
increasingly submerged into the hegemonic homogeneity of classic
mass culture, today a global electronic media culture that reproduces
itself through ceaseless diversification.
To retum to my earlier question: how can we compare post­
classical and preclassical modes of spectatorship or early modem and
postmodern forms of mass and consumer culture? Obviously, we are
dealing with substantially different stages of historical development, not
only on the social and cultural level but, fundamentally, in terms of the
organization of capital and the media industries. Nonetheless, from the
perspective of the public sphere, a number of affinities suggest them­
selves. Both periods are characterized by a profound transfonnation of
the relations of cultural representation and reception and by a measme
of instability that makes the intervening decades look relatively stable
by contrast, for they are anchored inand centered by the classical system .
Both stages of media. culture vary from the classical nonn of controlling
reception througb a strong diegetic effect, ensured by particular textual
strategies and a suppression of the exhibition context. By contrast,
preclassical and postclassical forms of spectatorship give the viewer a
greater leeway, for better Or for worse, in interacting with the film-a
greater awareness of exhibition and cultural intettexts. Both early mod­
em and postrnodem· media publics draw on the perlphezy-then, Oil
socially marginslized and diverse constituencies within American na­
tional culture, and today, on massive movements of migration on a global
scale that, along with the globalization of media consumption, have
irrevocably changed the terms of local and national identity.
Early cinema could have developed in a number of ways, inasmuch
as it contained "a number ofroads not tal<en."aa Postmodem media culture
seems to be characterized by a similar opening up of new directions and
possibilities combined, however, with vast! y enhanced powers of seduction,
manipulation, and destruction. Putting early modern and postmodemfonns
of media consumption in a constellation may take away some of the
inevitability the classical paradigm has acquired both inHollywood self-pro­
motion and in functionalist film histories.34 Drawing a trajectory between
these two moments in the Pistory of public life may mal<e classical cinema
and the classical mass culture of the NewDea1 and Cold War eras look more
lil<e a historical interlude, a deep-freeze perhaps, than the teleological nOrm
that it has become and that has shaped our approaches to reception. And
once we have shifted the frame, classical cinema j tself may no longer look
quite as classical as study of its dominant mode suggests.
NOTES
1. Mary Ann Doane, "1V1is:recognition and Identity/' Cina·T.raf'A'S 3:3 [Fali19S0J, 29_
2. See Juhn Ellis, Visible Fictions: CJ.'nema, Television. Video ILondon: Routledge,
1982), pp. 24} 50, 128, 137ft; also see Charles Eidsvik, "Machines of '!;he Invisible: Chan.ges
in Film Technology in the A<;e of Video," Film Quarterly 42:2 [Winter 1988-89), 21.
150
151
1v.firiam Han~en
Tramformati!mS ojthe Public Sphere
3. TimothyCpnigan.,A Cinema without Wal1.s: Movies and GuIturea[tet Vietnam
(New Brunswick" N.J.: :Rutgers University Press, 19911, p. 23.
4. Ironically, the European art film has become one of the more likely places for
ccmtempol'ary viewers to expect a relatively high degree of classical absorption, This may
partially explain the U.S. success of The Crying Game INe.:U Jordan, 19921, a film that,
despite its self-conscious politics-of readiIlg, still very much depends on a classical diegetic
effect (without which its trick would not work).
5. Among the growing literature on these developments seel for instance, Arjun
Appadurai, fiDlsjuneture andDilie:rence in the Global Cultural Economy, 11 PubJic Culture
2 (Spring 19901, 1-24, Mike PeatherstOlle, ed., Theory. Cu1rure oJ Society (SAGEI 7: 1·2
IBeverly Hills, Lonoon: 1990) !special issue on global culture}; Kevin Robins~ "Tradition
and Translation: National Culture in Its Global ConteXt," :in John Comer and Sylvia
Harvey, cds" Enterprise and Heritage: CrosscurreJ1tso/ National Culture {London; Rout"
ledge} 1991 If pp_ 21-44; Arm.and MattclartJ La Commumcation-monde: h.istoire des idees
etdes strategies [Faris: LaDecouverte, 1992j.SeeilsoCyntbia Schneider and Brian Wa.llis,
eds., Global Television (New York: Wedge Press; Cambridge, Mass., Massachusetts
Institute of TecbnologyPress l 1988J_
6. See, for instance, Hamid Na.£icy, "Autobiography, Film Spectatorship, and Cu1~
tural Negotiation," Emetgence.s 1 (Fall 1989~, 29-54, ,and ('The Poetics and Praetice of
hanian Nostalgia in Bxile/' Diaspora 1:3 {l991l, 285-302; Kobena Mercer, "Diaspora
Culture and the Dialogic Imatination: The Aesthetics of Black lndependent Film in
Britain,r! in M1.nuci Alvarado and John O. Thompson, eds" The Media Reader {London:
British Film Institute. 19901, pp. 24-35.
7. Cornel West, 'IThc New Cultural Politics of Difference," in Russell Ferguson!
Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh·4 and Cornel West, eds., Out Tbete: Marginalization and
Contemporary Cultures [New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art) Cambridge/
lvlass., Mld London: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1990), p, 29,
8. Exa:rnples in the United States include Guer.ri1la TV, Edge, PaperT.i.ger, :md Deep
Dish Television. On some of the theoretical issues involved in such efforts l see Patricia
Me11encamp, "Prologue, I! Logics of Television ILondon: BritishFihn Institute; Blooming­
ton: Indima University Press, 199Oj, pp, 1-13. Also pettinentin this rcgardis the ongoing
debate over indigenous uses of film and video in ethnography; see, fer instance, Terence
Turner, 'TIefumt Images: The KaYllpO Appropriation of Video, II Anthropology Today 8:6
[December 19921. 5-16.
9. TOm Gunnin,g, "The Cinema of Atttaction[s]," Wide Angle 8:3·4 (19861,63-70,
rpt, in ThOIDflS Elsaesser and Adam ll."lrker; eds" Early Cmema: Space, Frame. Narrative
fLondon: British Film Institute, 19901, Pl". 56-62.
10_ See essays .in pt. 1 of Thomas Blsaesser and Adam &rkcr, Early Cinema, Noel
Burch. "'PortCI,or Ambh'alence," Scteen 19:4 !Winter 1978/791, 91-105, and Li/-eto Those
Shadov,,"S, cd. and tr. Ben Bre\'Istet IBerkeley and Los Angelcs: University of California
Press, 1990); Kristin Thompson, pt. 3 of David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin
Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode ofProduction to 1960
(New York: Columbia University Press, '1985); Charles Musser, Tlw Emergence of Cin­
ema: TbeAme.dcan Screen to 1907(New York: Scribner's, 1990}; Before the Nickelod.eon:
Ed-wia S. Porter and the FJdison Manufacttrring Co.m:pany (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1991). The question of early fUm-viewer relations is
elaborated in greater detail in my book Babel and Eabylon: Spectatorship in American
S~t Film {Cambridge, .Mass.: Harvard University Pressf 1991). chs, 1-3,
11, d. Linda Williams, IiFilm Bodies: Gender, Ge:nre} and Excess, 1/ Film Quarterly
44ISummer 1991), 2-13, and Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the "Prenzyofthe Visible'·
!Berkeley and Los Angeles. University of California Press, 1989); also see Tom Gunning,
"An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the lInlCredulous Spectator,11 Arc eV Text
34 (Fall 19891, 31..45.
12. Charles 1\t1usser, liThe Nickelodeon Bra Begins: Establishing the Framework for
Hoilyw'ood1s Mode of Representation" (19831, rpt. in Elsaesscr and Barker, Early Cinema,
256-73.
13, See Richard Koszarski, An Eve.ning's Entmtlin."1Jent: Thl! Age 0/ thl! Silent
Feature Picture, 1915-1928 [New York: Scribcner's, 19901- ch. 2, and Douglas Gomery;
Shared Pleasures: .A History of Movie PresenUltion in the United Stat8S {Madison:
University of Wisconsin Pressl 19921, ch. 3,
14, Tom G'uIm.ing. "~as, UndeI'$tanding, and Funhcr QuestiOns: Early Cinema
:Research in Its Sccond Decade since Brighton, II Persistence of Vision 9 !1991 JI 6.
15. Noel Burch, flNarrativelDiegesis-Thresholds} Limits," Screen 23:8 nu1y~
August 19821,33 Irev. in Life to Those Shadows 263). Also see ThoIlWl B1saesserl "TV
tMQughJheLooldng Glass," OJlarterly Review a! JIilm 'll Video 14:1-2 (19911, 5.
16. On Kluge's relationship to Adorno, see StuaIt Liebman's inte:rv:iew !fOn New
German Cinema. AI;, Enlightenment," October461Fall19881, 23-69. especially pp. 36£1.
For Kluge's influence in turn on Adorno, see the latters 1966 essay "Transparencies on
Film," tr. Thomas y, Levin, New Gennan Critique 24·25 11981-82)' 199-205, as well as
my "Introduction," Ibid. 186-98.
17. Jiirgen Habermas, StrukttIl1Vandel der Offentlichkeit (Darmstadt and N euwiedj
West Germany: Luchterhand. 1962L tr. Thomas Buxger, The StructuralTIans/ormation
0/ the: Public Sphere (Cambridge! Mass.: MaSSachusetts Institute of Technology Pressl
1989). Sec·Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphsre ICambridge, Mass., and
London: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1992); also see Bruce Robbins, ed.,
The Phantom Public Sphere (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 19931.
18. See Nicholas Gamham, flThe Media and the Public Sphere," in Cilhoun,
Habermas and the Public Spbere:, pp. 359-76; also see Michael Warner, uTheMass Public
and the Mass Subject," ibid.; pp. 377-40 I, and Benjamin Lee, tiT cxtuality, Mediation, and
Public Discourse, II ibid" pp. 402-18.
19. Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Oftentlichl;eit und Erfahrung IFrankfurt:
'Subrkamp, 19721; The Public Sphere and Experience, tr. Peter Labanyi, JamleDaniel, and
Assenka Okstloff l1V1.in.neapolis: University of Minnesota 1)rcss1 1993). For a more detailed
discussion of that book, see my Foreword to the_<\merican edition.. alsopublishcd inPublic
Culture 5:2 {Winter 19931, 179-212.
.
20. Negt and KlllllC, Oftev.tlicbkeit und Sr/ahnmg, pp. 17-18.
21. Thete are interesting contiguities between Negt's and Kluge's notion of the
context of living and Michel de Certea:u's reflections on The Practice of FJvezyday Life, tr,
Steven ltandall (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press! 1984),
22. The concept of experience tEtfahzungj assumed here iB a highly specific one,
elaborated-in different ways-by Benjamin, Bloc.h! Kracauerl and Adorno. See H:a.nsen,
"Foreword," Public Spbere and .li:kperience, pp. xvi-xiXi "Beo.jamin, Cin.errul and Experi­
ence: 'The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology,'" New German Critique 40 IWinter
1987), 179-224; "Of Wee and Ducks: Benjamin and Adorno on DisneY,'1 SouthArlantic
Quarterly 92:1 (Winte, 19931, 4()-41.
2,3, Negt and Kluge adopt this term from Hans Magnus Enzcnsberge:t/ "Constituents
of a Theory of the MediaN (19701, tr. Stuart Hood, in Reinhold Grimm and Bruce
AImstrong,eds., Critical Essays !New York: Continuum, 1982)1 pp. 46-76.
24. I1We arc interested i:n what] in a world where it is so obvious that catastrophes
occur, performs the labor that bIings about material change." Prerace, Gescbichte und
Eigenstnn {Frnnkfun: Zweitausendeins! 1981 Lp. 5, Also see Fredric Tameson, NOn Negt
and Kluge/' October 46/1983),151-77, and Christopher Pavsek, "Alexander Kluge and
Postmodemism or Realism and the Public Sphere," unpublished r:rianuseript,
152
Miriam Hansen
25. See Meaghan Monis1s If television anecdote" {about the 1988 Sydney birthday
cake scandal], which offers a graphic exaxnple of the conjunctural quality of public life,
involving a fleeting appropriation or tactical intervention on the part of Australian
Aborigines, in IIBanality in Cultural Studies,rl Logics of Televisian. ed. Patricia Mellen~
camp, (Bloomington: '!:adiana University Press, 1990)/ 2SI. Morris emphasizes the aspect
of Ntirn:in.g, a seizingofpropitious l?oments, /I which tallies with Kluge's concept of public
intervention; see in particular his 1974 film on the Frankfun housing struggle, In Danger
and D;ireDistre.9S the Middle of the:Road Leads toDeatb. The name of his film production
.
company is kaiIos. Greek for propitiou,t; moment.
26. AJexaudeJ: Kluge, "On Film and the Public Sphere," tr. ThOID2.S Y. Levin and
MiIiam Hansen, New German C.riti~ue24.25IFallfWinter 1981-821,206.
27. See Negt and Kluge, Offentlichl<eit uml Erjabrung, ells 3-5.
28. On Kluge's television wor~ see Margaret Morse, NTen to Eleven: Television by
Alexander Kluge,lI 1989 Amer.ican Film InstItute Video Festival (Los Angeles: American
Film Institute, 1989), pp. 50-53) Miriam Hansen, II Reinventing the Nickelodeon: Notes
on Kluge and Early Cinema:' October 461Fal119881, 173-98; Stuart Liebmm, "On New
German Cinema, Art; Enlightenment, and the Public Sphere: An Interview with Alexan~
der Kluge, II ibid" 23-59, especially pp. 300.; Yvonne Rainer and Ernest Larsen, '''We Are
Demolition Artists': An Interview with Alexander Kluge," Til. Independent IJune 19891,
VoL 12, 5:18-25i GertrodKoch, /f Alexander Kluge's Phantom of the Opera/' NewGerman
Critique 49!Winter 19901, 79-88.
29. Ian Bre:akwelLmd Paul Hammond, eci.<!., Seeing in the Dark: A Compendium of
Cinernagoing (London: Serpent's Tail, 1990], p. 8.
30. Hansen, Babel md BabylO1l, ch. 3.
31, See Mary Carbine) (J'The Finest Outside the Loop': Motion Picture Exhibition
in Chicago's Black Metropolis; 1905-1928/' Camera Obscura 23 !May 1990/1 9-41;
Gomery, Snared Pleasme8, ch. 8.
32. See, for instance/ Jane Gafnes, ItThe Queen ChriStina TieKUps: The Convergence
of Show Window ""d Screen," Quarterly Review of Film and Video 11:1119891,35--60,
Gaylyn Studlart "The Perils of Pleasurct Fan Magazine Discourse as Women's Cornu
modified Culture in the 1920s," Wide: Angle 13:1 11991/, ~3; Hansen, Babel and
Babylon, ehs. 11 md 12; Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society lNew
York: St. Martin's Press, 19861, ch. 2, and Pamela Robertson, "'The lGnda Comedy That
Imitates Me': Mae Wer-es Idcntific<ltion with the Feminist Camp/I Cinema Jouma132:2
(Winter 1993), 57-72.
33, Tom Gunning. /IAn Unseen Energy Swallows Space: The Space:in Early Film
and Its Relation to American Avant-Garde Film, I> in John 1. Fell, ed., Film before Griffith
IBerkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983), p. 366.
34. See, for instance, David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson} T1:te
Classical Hollywood Cinema In. 10/ above,.
Viewing Antitheses